“Okay. Five more minutes till the next meeting!”

“Who does not feel like there are too many meetings nowadays?”

Meetings are an important tool for any organization. It is one part team building, one part rapport, and most importantly to facilitate communication that helps the organization more effectively address challenges and accomplish goals. The problem is when principals have meetings that do not actually say anything or pull human assets from mission critical jobs to listen to conversations that do not really apply to what they are doing. This achieves the exact opposite of team building and morale boosting if the individual attendees (salaried) have to eat overtime to make up for unproductive meetings. It also looks like have meetings to justify managerial roles and is insensitive to skilled, specialized associates that actually do technical work.

Meetings are a necessary part of doing business. However, if you conduct meetings in your organization, it is a good idea to get some feedback using Survey Monkey or some other service that can provide anonymous input from stakeholders in the organization. Pulling people from their jobs and messing up their rhythm without justification is not a way to generate a positive work environment, encourage collaboration, or increase productivity.  Again, meetings are necessary but do not overdo it and make sure that sponsors make them meaningful otherwise a decrease in company engagement may be an unwanted byproduct.

Good luck and let’s get back to work.